Mr. Big Shot sat in a cell in Portland’s federal courthouse Thursday morning.
Chauncey Billups was arrested before dawn as part of a coordinated FBI operation that also nabbed the likes of Spanish G and Albanian Bruce, Flappy, Pookie, Black Tony, Juice and The Wrestler, a whole host of nefarious characters with alleged Mafia ties.
Are you kidding?
How utterly surreal.
How utterly... stupid.
The bombshell of Trail Blazers’ head coach Chauncey Billups arrest amid a broader gambling probe embarrasses the NBA, certainly. It raises serious questions about the validity of the games we watch, love and, yes, wager on.
But most urgently in Portland?
It makes you wonder how the Trail Blazers ever got so far down the road with a coach who arrived in Portland with the baggage of a decades-old rape allegation and now leaves in handcuffs.
What had to go wrong to allow the franchise to put so much faith in a man who, if the allegations against him are proven true, would act so malevolently? Who would be so flagrantly reckless with his own reputation and jeopardize his franchise’s integrity?
Over a nearly three-decade association with professional basketball, including winning Most Valuable Player in the 2004 NBA Finals, Billups has built his career on being the ultimate winner. A true, voracious competitor.
What he is accused of would shatter that hard-earned reputation.
He is not a winner. No, no.
If the indictment is to be believed, he is a cheat. He is a $100 million man with the world at his fingertips and, apparently, a card up his sleeve. That is how he will be remembered.
An addiction to winning — at any cost, even to one’s own credibility — is not the same as being driven by it.
True competitors do not cheat. They can’t. The possibility of losing is itself the thrill.
What the FBI alleges is that Billups participated in rigged poker games on at least two occasions, in April 2019 and October 2020, fully complicit in the orchestration of the conspiracy. Taking advantage of gamblers who were drawn in by the opportunity play with a celebrity.
According to the indictment, at various stages the con involved electronic poker chip trays that could secretly read cards placed on the table and playing cards that had markers that could only be read by players wearing special contact lenses or sunglasses. A player in on the scheme, the “quarterback,” would signal to others at the table with simple hand signals who had the best cards.
Billups was what the conspirators allegedly referred to as a “face card.” A celebrity employed to attract gamblers.
The games Billups is accused of helping fix in Las Vegas relied on rigged shuffling machines.
Did he know the lengths of the conspiracy with which he had allegedly become involved? Did he know that the games he played in were part of a vast scheme that tied back to the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families?
There is no way to know at this stage, of course, but I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I’m willing to believe he was commissioned for one-offs. But even if he was in it for a cheap thrill or a cheap buck, he was willing to gamble away his legacy and swindle people who were awed by it.
In the last three years, I’ve gotten to know Billups through our respective jobs, as much as we can ever know the athletes and stars we cover. I’ve liked him. He was warm and engaging and it was easy to understand why players respond to him. He has also grown into his role as head coach.
None of that matters if he did what he is accused of. In that case, he has perpetrated a fraud on all of us. On Blazers’ chair Jody Allen and general manager Joe Cronin, on the Trail Blazers’ players and their fans.
I can’t convict Chauncey. That’s not how due process works. But I can condemn him for what appears to be profoundly poor judgment and an incredible betrayal of his position in this city.
The official charges in this case are money laundering and wire fraud. He was among more than 30 people indicted on Thursday as part of a two-prong multi-agency gambling probe that spanned both coasts.
The separate investigations identified both the rigged illegal poker games as well as a sports-betting scheme involving insider information that FBI Director Kash Patel called “the insider trading saga for the NBA.”
It’s not lost on me what a theatrical circus the Justice Department made of their announcement, utilizing several groan-inducing puns to describe the sting, including “Operation Nothing But Bet.”
Billups was a relatively small fish in this grand scheme and yet the FBI used his household name to headline their announcement and garner acclaim.
I found that mildly distasteful, but Billups is at fault for allegedly putting himself in this position.
He is not identified in the sports-betting indictment, which named Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and ex-NBA player Damon Jones among the defendants.
However, the indictment refers to a “Co-Conspirator 8,” who lived in Oregon was an “NBA player from approximately 1997 through 2014 and an NBA coach since at least 2021.”
Yeah.
Billups was drafted third overall by the Boston Celtics in 1997. His eight-team career spanned 17 seasons and he retired in 2014 as a member of the Detroit Pistons. The Los Angeles Clippers hired him as an assistant coach in 2021, the year before he joined the Blazers.
Co-Conspirator 8 was alleged to have provided information about the Blazers plans to tank against the Chicago Bulls on March 24, 2023, leading to named defendants wagering more than $100,000 on the Blazers to lose.
And if we are to believe that Co-Conspirator 8 is Billups, and if the allegations against Co-Conspirator 8 are indeed true, then it does not matter that his actions did not meet the standard for a federal indictment. The NBA operates by a different standard.
Every NBA player, coach and employee is reminded daily about the rules involving betting, fixing and tipping. Found to have violated that policy, Billups — so universally loved by those in the game that he easily could have been hired as a coach, executive or broadcaster — could be banned from the game for life.
Was it worth it?
Last September, Billups slipped into an orange blazer in Springfield, Massachusetts, the universal symbol of reaching basketball’s pinnacle: The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
On Thursday morning, he was placed in handcuffs.
He will have his day in court.
But his days on an NBA court are almost certainly over.
All so he could allegedly sell out his team and sell off parts of himself.
How utterly sad.
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